Microsoft updates Bing’s voice search on Windows Phone

Microsoft has announced that it has been rolling out updates to Windows Phone customers to better the accuracy of voice-to-text and voice search on the device. The result, claims the company, is that Bing now returns results twice as fast as before.

Search results on Windows Phone now are up to15 percent more accurate and we have deep neural networks (DNN) to thank for it. DNN is a piece of technology that is supposed to have been inspired by the functioning of neurons in the brain. Microsoft has used DNN’s technology to detect patterns quite like how the biological system recognises them.

Twice as fast

The faster search function has been developed as a result of Microsoft Research and Bing’s teams working upon DNN. We had first heard about the faster Bing search earlier this year in March, when a leaked video from the company’s employee-only event emerged. A live demo saw Microsoft test the voice recognition feature side-by-side with the existing system. The results on the newer voice recognition system came back about 0.5 seconds faster.

The Bing Speech Team writes in a blog that by coupling Microsoft Research’s breakthroughs in the use of DNN with the large datasets provided by Bing’s indexing, the DNN’s were able to learn more quickly. This helped in Bing’s voice capabilities get closer to how humans perceive speech.

“We also made a few improvements under the hood that allowed Bing to more easily identify speech patterns and cut through ambient and background noise – cutting down response time by half and improving the word error rate by 15 percent, even in noisy situations,”the team writes. Bing has promised that this is “only the beginning” of the search service’s efforts to improving speech and voice capabilities all across Microsoft’s devices and services.

The updates that energise Bing have only been rolling out to devices in the US currently, with no word on when the rest of the world will get to experience the DNN-enhanced search service.

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